Some puppy love at Christmastime

This year’s edition of the Tatum family Christmas card features a passel of playful puppies, eight adorable, bright-eyed, three week-old English springer spaniels, courtesy of the romantic liaison between my female, Phoebe, and her significant other, Ringo, back in September. The cute little crew, consisting of five females and three males, made the scene a few days earlier than expected. All were lively, hungry, and healthy.

When it comes to sporting dogs, I freely confess my bias toward the English springer spaniel, and my rich personal history with this popular breed stretches back four decades to that fateful June afternoon in 1974 when I purchased my first springer pup, a female we named Raina. My puppy pick-up was made more memorable that day since I was accompanied by one Miss Patti Grant, the lovely young lady who, five years later, would become my wife.

In the interim Raina served as the perfect hunting companion with an awesome nose for finding and flushing ring-neck pheasants. Back in the pheasant hunting heyday of the 70s when those beautiful long-tailed birds were abundant throughout Chester County, we spent many eventful autumn days afield together. In fact, my very first published article, which appeared in the October 1984 issue of Pennsylvania Sportsman magazine, featured a successful Chester County pheasant hunt with Raina. Over the years, Patti and I raised a few litters of springers together and occasionally succumbed to the temptation to keep one of the always endearing pups for ourselves.

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After wild pheasants disappeared from the scene, our family’s springer tradition endured. There were still stocked pheasants to chase and I eventually joined the Brandywine Sporting Dogs Association to take advantage of their regulated shooting grounds and longer seasons on game birds like pheasant, quail, chukar, and partridge. Beyond their hunting prowess, another nice thing about English Springers is what great all-around companions they make even if you never take them hunting.

The last springer we owned from Raina’s bloodline was a dog named Nick. When Nick passed on to that canine happy hunting ground many years ago, it was the first time we had been “springerless” since that fateful first date. But when I finally spotted an ad for newborn springers four years ago, I couldn’t resist. Accompanied by my two daughters Alex and Erin on our own designated dog date, we drove to Morgantown to check out the litter bred by Jack and Robin McPeak.

It didn’t take long to fall in love with a little black and white female puppy, a real sweetheart the girls soon named Phoebe. Phoebe, or “Pheebs” as I generally call her, has since been my constant companion and a wonderful house pet with the sweetest disposition imaginable. After some coaxing from my wife and daughters, I agreed to breed the Phoebler just once before having her “fixed.”

Going online to search for an appropriate stud, we took great pains to avoid the puppy mill scene, searching for a family-raised pet, until we finally located a promising potential mate named Ringo, a tri-color liver and white dog owned by the Luber family in Manchester, Maryland. Tri-color springers are either liver, white and tan or black, white, and tan with the tan showing up only under the ears and over the eyes.

For Phoebe and Ringo, a torrid love affair ensued, shall we say. Springers have a 63 day gestation period, and we were soon counting down the days toward the anticipated blessed event we calculated would occur the first of December as family and friends offered guesses as to how many puppies we could expect from the increasingly rotund Phoebe. But then, on the afternoon of Friday, November 29 (that’s Black Friday to all you mall door-busters) the puppies, eight all told, burst onto the scene. Apparently they didn’t want to miss all those Black Friday sales.

In any case, the timing worked out perfectly since our entire family was on hand for the occasion. Our younger daughter, Erin, recently graduated from Cal-Berkeley and taking a year off before heading off to grad school at Leeds University in jolly old England, was home. Older daughter Alex, a fourth year medical student at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City was home for Thanksgiving between residency interviews. During Phoebe’s five and a half hour labor marathon, Alex slapped on a pair of latex gloves and served as the attending physician while both she and her sister took copious notes on time of birth, sex, color, and distinctive markings of each little newborn.

Within the next day or two, the girls had already provided names for the pups. For example, the fourth born pup, a female that I consequently dubbed “Quatro,” was later christened “Rorschach” (aka Rory) since the pattern of white markings on her back suggested a Rorschach test. Appropriately enough, my daughter Alex, who plans to pursue a career in psychiatry, came up with that name (my running joke, of course, is that I inspired my daughter to become a psychiatrist).

And yes we know that giving the little guys names will just make them that much harder to part with when we turn them over to their new owners, but what ya’ gonna’ do? That won’t happen for another few weeks, and in the meantime we’ll just enjoy the puppy ride. By the way, at this writing not all of the pups are spoken for, so if you know anyone in the market for an adorable pedigree spaniel pup, shoot me an e-mail at tatumt2@yahoo.com. In the meantime, here’s wishing all my readers a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful holiday season.